Cover

Title Page, Copyright Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

I am a proud product of a public school education, and my ability to engage
and be inspired by my teachers was the direct result of the public tax
funds that paid their salaries, built my classrooms, and bought the textbooks
that opened up the world for me outside my small rural town. I am also the
result of the taxpayer money that fed, sheltered, and clothed me through
much of my childhood from programs like Aid to Families with Dependent
Children, as well as the federal grants and loans that allowed me to...

Introduction: Taxpayer Citizenship and the Right to Education

In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the question of whether the Republican
candidate, Donald J. Trump, had paid U.S. income tax became regular
fodder for the news media. Based on pages from his tax records in 1995
that were leaked to the New York Times, there was speculation late in the
campaign that Trump had very likely not paid federal taxes for many years.1
Yet the unapologetic, winking response from the candidate was, as he said
to reporters before and after the election, that “people don’t care” about...

Chapter One. A Shabby Meanness: Origins of Unequal Taxation

In the decades after the Civil War, black education was frequently deployed
as a political tool by white elites to rally poor and working-class whites away
from potential coalitions by implying that tax funding for education was
really “white” funding for black schooling, and that it would only encourage
black resistance and rebellion. In her famous analysis of Southern lynch law
in 1892, Ida B. Wells traced the classic excuses offered by the Memphis Evening
Scimitar newspaper to justify lynchings, beginning with the narrative...

Chapter Two. Let Them Plow: Beyond the Black-White Paradigm

One of the only cases to reach the U.S. Supreme Court on school desegregation
in the early decades of the twentieth century was Gong Lum v. Rice
in 1927.1 Martha Lum was nine years old when her father, Gong Lum, a
well-to-do Chinese grocer, attempted to send her to the white school
in Rosedale, Mississippi in 1924. She was refused admission by white authorities.
The claim made by Lum’s attorneys in their lawsuit was that Martha
Lum was wrongly listed by white school officials as a “colored” child and...

Chapter Three. We Are Taxpaying Citizens: Separate and Color-Blind

In Covington County, Mississippi, in 1925, separate schools for black and
white children were a given. For the African American trustees of Hopewell,
the black school district, the profound inequality between their schools and
the white schools of the Calhoun consolidated district was a more constant
source of frustration. What made it even more frustrating was that many
of them owned property inside the territory included in the Calhoun white
school district—property they were taxed on for the support of those white...

Chapter Four. A Drain on Taxpayers: Graduate School Segregation and the Road to Brown

R. I. Brigham, self-described as a “white educator,” argued in 1946 in an
article in the Baltimore Afro-American that segregated schools were “a drain
on taxpayers” and were “costly and wasteful” to Missouri.1 The straightforwardly
economic argument that separate schools were ultimately a waste
of taxpayer resources was deployed in various ways by the NAACP and
many other advocates in the graduate school segregation cases as a conscious
strategy to force the fiscal hand of segregationist states. For example, in 1936,...

As the Supreme Court was debating Brown v. Board of Education in early
1954, Harry A. Johnston wrote a letter from his home in Alabama to Justice
Robert Jackson. Johnston wrote to lament the possible desegregation ruling
anticipated from the court, saying he spoke on behalf of “the taxpaying
citizens as individuals, as well as parents,” who, he said, did not want
to have to accept blacks “on an equality basis.”1 Ultimately, one of the most
common refrains in the grassroots debates around judicial desegregation...

Chapter Six. Taxpayers and Taxeaters: Poverty and the Constitution

As the schools in Prince Edward County were closing down and diverting
the public school tax fund to private options rather than submit to desegregation
orders, not far away a similar case was brewing in Newport News,
Virginia. During that litigation, the Newport News school board’s attorney,
Archibald Robertson, pointedly asked a city official how much of the public
relief fund “goes to Negroes and how much to whites.” After pressing for the
answer that “ninety percent” of the “aid to dependent children, general relief...

In 1971 the New York Times reported that Andrew J. Spano, a taxpayer in
Westchester, was suing his local school district, Lakeland Central, as well
as the State of New York, claiming that the use of local property taxes to
fund education was unconstitutional.1 Spano brought the suit shortly after
the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of a similar suit in Serrano v.
Priest. Spano argued that his district, with its minimal tax base and modest
homes, had a real estate value of only about a third of a wealthy...

Conclusion: Education, Inequality, and the Hidden Power of Taxes

In 1959, the United Nations adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the
Child, which held that children were entitled to receive free and compulsory
education to enable them “on the basis of equal opportunity” to develop
their abilities and become “useful member[s] of society.”1 Over fifty
years later, children enjoyed a constitutional right to education in Mexico,
Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Finland,
Switzerland, Sweden, China, and Russia, among others, though, as...

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